Digital Assistants the New Eye-Witness

The popularity of virtual
digital assistants is growing at a pace never seen; the estimated number of
people using digital assistants worldwide is projected to reach 1.8 billion by
2021. These “assistants” make our lives easier and relevant but they also can
equate to a serious privacy concern. From issues of assistants recording conversations
by error and sending to uninvolved contacts, to documenting and storing all
voice commands; investigators as well as users should be privy to the
consequences, or evidence. Today, digital assistants are becoming one of the
more valuable sources of evidence to investigators and have already been used
to solve several noteworthy crimes.

Amazon Alexa

As of January
2019, Amazon’s development devices team announced they had sold over one-hundred
million Alexa-enabled devices which is now available in over forty countries. When
an Alexa user utters the wake word to perform a skill a recording of the query
is sent to the user’s Amazon cloud account. The user specific request is
processed and a response is returned to the device. Investigators, armed with
Oxygen Forensic Cloud Extractor, can extract Amazon Alexa data to include these
valuable recordings of that actual utterance by the user.

How to Gain Access

Oxygen Forensic Cloud Extractor can obtain access to the Amazon Alexa account using either login/password or user token. A user’s token can be extracted from either the mobile device(s) or PC(s) Alexa is currently paired to. The Amazon Alexa token can be found in the Cloud Account section in Oxygen Forensic Detective after the mobile device has been acquired. If using a PC to locate the Amazon Alexa, simply run our Oxygen Forensic KeyScout utility. Using our powerful KeyScout utility a user’s token can be recovered if the user has logged into their Amazon Alexa account in their PC’s web browser. It should be noted that using a token will allow an investigator to bypass 2-factor authentication that had been set within the Amazon Alexa account.

Data from Cloud

Once the cloud extraction has
completed the investigator can either elect to import the collected evidence to
Oxygen Forensic Detective or to our new Oxygen Forensic JetEngine module. The lion’s
share of data from mobile applications are stored within the cloud. With this being said, it should be
understandable that there is a massive amount of user data available for
collection. Without question, Oxygen
Forensic Cloud Extractor acquires more data from these services than any other
competing tool, hands down. The valuable data extracted can contain a wealth of
information to include: account and device details, contacts, user activity, incoming
and outgoing messages, calendars, notifications, user created lists, created/installed
skills, preferences, and more. One amazing feature in the software is the
ability to extract the stored voice commands given to Alexa by the user. The users actual voice! The information extracted from Amazon will
undoubtedly give tremendous insights into the user’s everyday activity, their
contacts, shared messages, and valuable voice commands.

Google Home

Like Amazon, Google has to
bring to market their own digital assistant. Today’s
documentation says that there were 52 Million Google Home devices sold
in 2018. Oxygen Forensic Detective arms investigators with tools to extract
data from Google Home from both mobile devices and the associated cloud service.

How to gain access

Oxygen Forensic Cloud Extractor
allows access to a user’s Google Home account by entering either the login/password
or a Google master token. Our robust software is also capable of finding Google
credentials both in a mobile devices’ image and on an associated PC. Finding
Google credentials extracted from a mobile device is easy; simply navigate to
the Cloud Accounts. Also, using our
KeyScout built-in utility the investigator can collect the token information
from the associated PC if the user had used the PC to log into their account.

Data from Cloud

Once
armed with credentials, the investigator can use the Oxygen Forensic Cloud Extractor
to access the Google Home account. Like in our many other supported cloud
services, the token will allow you to bypass 2-factor authentication if enabled.
If your investigated user utilizes a username and password for login authentication
simply be prepared to verify the identity by one of the available methods: SMS, Google Authenticator, backup codes, prompt or USB
token. Google cloud provides investigators with a tremendous amount of data that
is generated by a Google Home user. Data includes, but is not limited to: account and device details, voice commands, and verbose
information about users. Again, like Alexa, investigators can listen to all the
voice recordings created by the Google home users directly in Oxygen Forensic
Detective.

Data from Mobile Devices

Many users of a Google Home
device use the Google Home to set up, manage and control a Google Home device. Oxygen
Forensic Detective supports the parsing and decoding of the Google Home app
data from both Apple iOS and Android devices. Data is available from iOS devices that have
been jailbroken or those collected physically by Grayshifts GrayKey . Android
devices must have root access or physical access to recover the database file
for Google Home. Oxygen Forensics, Inc. offers a wide range of physical
collection methods that are successful on a large set of Android devices.

Extracted information from the mobile app, once obtained,
will include: account and device details, cache, cookies, nearby devices, and
other valuable user data. It should be understood that the mobile app for
Google is an active application and the app contains far less data than what is
stored in the user’s associated cloud account.
A user’s cloud account is recommended if the investigation calls for the
recovery the user’s complete stored history.